Friday, January 13, 2017

ROBERT PARRY -- Pulling a J. Edgar Hoover on Trump

President-elect Trump is fending off a U.S. intelligence leak of unproven
allegations that he cavorted with Russian prostitutes, but the darker story
might be the CIA’s intervention in U.S. politics.

By Robert Parry

January 12, 2017 "Information Clearing House"
- "Consortium News" - The
decision by the U.S. intelligence community to include in an official report
some unverified and salacious accusations against President-elect Donald Trump
resembles a tactic out of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook on
government-style blackmail: I have some very derogatory information about you
that I’d sure hate to see end up in the press.

In this case, as leaders of the U.S. intelligence community were
pressing Trump to accept their assessment that the Russian government had tried
to bolster Trump’s campaign by stealing and leaking actual emails harmful to
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Trump was confronted with this classified
“appendix” describing claims about him cavorting with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel room.

Supposedly, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and CIA
Director John Brennan included the unproven allegations in the report under the
rationale that the Russian government might have videotaped Trump’s misbehavior
and thus could use it to blackmail him. But the U.S. intelligence community
also had reasons to want to threaten Trump who has been critical of its
performance and who has expressed doubts about its analysis of the Russian
“hacking.”

After the briefing last Friday, Trump and his incoming administration
did shift their position, accepting the intelligence community’s assessment
that the Russian government hacked the emails of the Democratic National
Committee and Clinton’s campaign chief John Podesta. But I’m told Trump saw no
evidence that Russia then leaked the material to WikiLeaks and has avoided
making that concession.

Still, Trump’s change in tone was noted by the mainstream media and was
treated as an admission that he was abandoning his earlier skepticism. In other
words, he was finally getting onboard the intelligence community’s
Russia-did-it bandwagon. Now, however, we know that Trump simultaneously
had been confronted with the possibility that the unproven stories about him
engaging in unorthodox sex acts with prostitutes could be released, embarrassing
him barely a week before his inauguration.

The classified report, with the explosive appendix, was also given to
President Obama and the so-called “Gang of Eight,” bipartisan senior members of
Congress responsible for oversight of the intelligence community, which
increased chances that the Trump accusations would be leaked to the press,
which indeed did happen.

Circulating Rumors

The stories about Russian intelligence supposedly filming Trump in a
high-end Moscow hotel with prostitutes have beencirculating around Washington for
months. I was briefed about them by a Hillary Clinton associate who was clearly
hopeful that the accusations would be released before the election and thus
further damage Trump’s chances. But the alleged video never seemed to surface
and the claims had all the earmarks of a campaign dirty trick.

However, now the tales of illicit frolic have been elevated to another
level. They have been inserted into an official U.S. intelligence report, the
details of which were leaked first to CNN and then to other mainstream U.S.
news media outlets.

Trump has denounced the story as “fake news” and it is certainly true
that the juicy details – reportedly assembled by a former British MI-6 spy
named Christopher Steele – have yet to check out. But the placement of the
rumors in a U.S. government document gave the mainstream media an excuse to
publicize the material.

It’s also allowed the media to again trot out the Russian word
“compromat” as if the Russians invented the game of assembling derogatory
information about someone and then using it to discredit or blackmail the
person.

In American history, legendary FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was infamous
for using his agency to develop negative information on a political figure and
then letting the person know that the FBI had the dirt and certainly would not
want it to become public – if only the person would do what the FBI wanted,
whether that was to reappoint Hoover to another term or to boost the FBI’s
budget or – in the infamous case of civil rights leader Martin Luther King –
perhaps to commit suicide.

However, in this case, it is not even known whether the Russians have
any dirt on Trump. It could just be rumors concocted in the middle of a
hard-fought campaign, first among Republicans battling Trump for the nomination
(this opposition research was reportedly initiated by backers of Sen. Marco
Rubio in the GOP race) before being picked up by Clinton supporters for use in
the general election.

Still, perhaps the more troubling issue is whether the U.S. intelligence
community has entered a new phase of politicization in which its leadership
feels that it has the responsibility to weed out “unfit” contenders for the
presidency. During the general election campaign, a well-placed intelligence
source told me that the intelligence community disdained both Clinton and Trump
and hoped to discredit both of them with the hope that a more “acceptable”
person could move into the White House for the next four years.

Hurting Both Candidates

Though I was skeptical of that information, it did turn out that FBI
Director James Comey, one of the top officials in the intelligence community,
badly damaged Clinton’s campaign by deeming her handling of her emails as
Secretary of State “extremely careless” but deciding not to prosecute her – and
then in the last week of the campaign briefly reopening and then re-closing the
investigation.

Then, after the election, President Obama’s CIA began leaking
allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin had orchestrated the hacking
of Democratic emails and provided them to WikiLeaks to reveal how the DNC
undermined Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign and what Clinton had told Wall Street
bigwigs in paid speeches that she had sought to keep secret from the American
people.

The intelligence community’s assessment set the stage for what could
have been a revolt by the Electoral College in which enough Trump delegates
could have refused to vote for him to send the election into the House of
Representatives, where the states would choose the President from one of the
top three vote-getters in the Electoral College. The third-place finisher
turned out to be former Secretary of State Colin Powell who got four votes from
Clinton delegates in Washington State. But the Electoral College ploy failed
when Trump’s delegates proved overwhelmingly faithful to the GOP candidate.

Now, we are seeing what looks like a new phase in this “stop (or damage)
Trump” strategy, the inclusion of anti-Trump dirt in an official intelligence
report that was then leaked to the major media.

Whether this move was meant to soften up Trump or whether the
intelligence community genuinely thought that the accusations might be true and
deserved inclusion in a report on alleged Russian interference in U.S. politics
or whether it was some combination of the two, we are witnessing a historic
moment when the U.S. intelligence community has deployed its extraordinary
powers within the domain of U.S. politics. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud.

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra
stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his
latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from Amazonand barnesandnoble.com).

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not
necessarily reflect Information Clearing House editorial policy.